The Forum of Advocacy and Democracy has presented a new complaint against the general secretary of Vox in Congress, José María Figaredo, following his statements in a television space in which he claimed that it was necessary to "hunt" the people who crossed in large numbers to Ceuta from Morocco on July 30 and 31. Days earlier, Compromís had already brought another document to the Prosecutor's Office for those same words.
This new document, addressed to the Prosecutor's Office of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court and to which Europa Press has had access, requests that Figaredo be summoned to testify as an investigated party for possible hate crimes and against the dignity of especially vulnerable groups.
The complaint gathers various messages and statements from the Vox leader disseminated on social networks and in the media. In them, migrants are referred to with expressions such as "hunt" or "fish" and are labeled as "invaders," according to the text sent to the Public Ministry.
"The expressions used present migrants as objects of persecution, capture, and return, through the repeated use of terms like 'hunt', 'catch them all', and 'fish', along with the characterization of the group as 'invaders'," emphasizes the document.
For the Forum, "the use of this language regarding people due to their migratory condition is objectively susceptible to undermining their dignity and representing the group as inferior, threatening, and deserving of coercive treatment," which "fosters, promotes, and incites hatred, hostility, discrimination, and violence against the migrant population."
Figaredo and his allusions to migrants as "prey"
According to the complaint, Figaredo resorted to "a treatment typical of a threat or of prey that must be pursued" when referring "to a group of people not for their individual acts, but for their condition as migrants."
The text adds that "the accused expressly requested the deployment of the Armed Forces to address the arrival of migrants, stating literally: 'What needs to be done is to put the Army in, catch them all, and return them to the place they came from'."
According to the Forum's compilation, in one of his public interventions and in reference to migrants, Figaredo went so far as to say: "We have to hunt them all, one by one," justifying this action by asserting that "they are invaders."
The entity recalls in its complaint that between July 30 and 31 there were "mass entries of migrant people, many of them minors, who risked their lives at sea in a context marked by the difficult social and economic conditions existing in Morocco."
"In any case, these are people who hold fundamental rights and the inherent dignity of every human being, regardless of their nationality, administrative situation, or migratory condition, and whose special situation of vulnerability requires public authorities to exercise particular diligence in the protection of their rights," concludes the Forum of Advocacy and Democracy.